Attention and Memory

“Attention is the gate keeper of awareness” (Bor 146). Daniel Bor argues that attention is the gateway to his own personal awareness. Without attention directed toward some feature of the world, one wouldn’t necessarily be aware of it. Attention filters the wide array of countless stimuli we are exposed to, and allows us to focus and retain approximately four pieces of information at a time. This is known as the working memory.  Consciousness and working memory are largely synonymous processes, with attention being the critical means by which items enter our consciousness. The human working memory is very limited in capacity, so humans result to using built in attention mechanisms and our conscious powers of analysis to regularly organize massive quantities of data into our consciousness.

Though it is still unclear how memories are exactly stored and accessed, neuroscientists have found that the hippocampus play a major role in memory formation. Changes in the connections of neural networks are the basis for memory formation.

                                 Credit: © Sergey Nivens / Fotolia

Bor states that our attention "chooses what enters consciousness because of pressing biological issues, such as a potential danger, and sometimes it chooses what enters based on a deliberate goal we have set ourselves." Recently, researchers have found that the more curious one is about a topic, the easier it is to learn information about that particular topic. Dr. Matthias Gruber, of University of California at Davis says, "Our findings potentially have far-reaching implications for the public because they reveal insights into how a form of intrinsic motivation, curiosity, affects memory." 

The study revealed three major findings. People are better at learning information when faced with a concept that sparks curiosity. Furthermore, curiosity was seen to help people retain information better. They also had the ability to learn completely unrelated information. Also intrinsic motivation, like curiosity, activates the same parts of the brain related with reward and extrinsic motivation. When learning was motivated by curiosity, the researchers found that there was an increase in activity in the hippocampus. 

These findings have many practical implications. By better understanding the relationship between memory and motivation, researchers could potentially develop treatments that help declining memory in the elderly and patients with memory impairment. This can also help in reforming educational settings and how teachers appeal to their students. We tend to focus more on things that interest us. As a result, when we are aware of things that bring about a feeling of curiosity, they will be better stored in our memory. 

References:

Bor, Daniel. The Ravenous Brain: How the New Science of Consciousness Explains Our Insatiable Search for Meaning. New York: Basic, 2012. Print

Cell Press. (2014, October 2). How curiosity changes the brain to enhance learning. ScienceDaily. Retrieved October 17, 2014 from www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/10/141002123631.htm